Word.ws English Dictionary

elt

elt verb: to injure (anything) by rough handling; handle roughly. Also the abbreviation of element.

Verb (1)

elt (third-person singular simple present elts, present participle elting, simple past and past participle elted)

  1. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, transitive) To injure (anything) by rough handling; handle roughly.
    • Du's eltin dat creature to death, boy!?
  2. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, transitive) To begrime; soil with mud; daub; smear.
    • Whin shü cam oot an fann me dere Wi peenie fairlins eltit.
    • Mi böts ir a' eltit wi' glaar.
    Synonyms:
    befoul, soil, stain, assoil, beclart, bedaub, bedirty, imbrue (especially with blood), bedizen, befile
  3. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, transitive) To work persistently or laboriously; be occupied in working (e.g. in the earth, rake among dirt, etc.).
  4. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, transitive) To meddle; interfere.
  5. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, transitive) To knead dough; stir dough previously kneaded to a proper consistency before baking.
  6. (Northern England, Scotland, UK, dialectal, intransitive) To become soft; become moist, as damp earth.

Noun capitalized: ELT

ELT (plural ELTs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of emergency locator transmitter.
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of euglobulin lysis time.
  3. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of English language teaching.

Verb (2) capitalized: ELT

ELT

  1. (abbreviation, initialism, data warehousing) Initialism of extract, load, transform.

Also used as

elt is also the abbreviation of element.

Synonyms of elt

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Forms of elt

Verb
third-person singular presentelts
present participleelting
past participleelted
pastelted
Noun
pluralelts
pluralELTs

Origin of elt

From Middle English elten (“to mold, knead, work”), from Old Norse elta (“to chase, hunt, knead”), from Proto-Germanic *alatjaną (“to drive, force, move”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁elh₂- (“to drive, move, go”). Cognate with Danish ælte (“to knead”), Swedish älta (“to dwell upon, brood, stir, knead”), Norwegian elte (“to knead”), Norwegian elta (“to pursue, plod”), Icelandic elta (“to chase”).

Shortening.

Words that rhyme with elt

12 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about elt

What does elt mean?
Elt means to injure (anything) by rough handling; handle roughly.
What part of speech is elt?
Elt can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of elt?
The past tense of elt is elted.

Words near elt in the dictionary

  1. Elstree and Borehamwood
  2. Elswick
  3. Elswicks
  4. Elsworth
  5. Elsworths
  6. elt
  7. Elta
  8. Eltanin
  9. eltanolone
  10. eltchi
  11. eltchis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: elt (page history and authors); ELT (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “elt.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/elt. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.